#children

🇸🇬 Singapore · Food from the Heart

Every day of the year, volunteer Bread Runners in Singapore collect bakery and hotel leftovers and deliver them to welfare homes, moving 199,000 kg in 2025.

🇲🇰 North Macedonia · Донирај компјутер (Donate a Computer)

What began in 2016 as one programmer repairing old PCs in Kavadarci has grown into a volunteer network that hands refurbished computers to families who cannot afford one.

🇳🇨 New Caledonia · Association Bwärä Tortues Marines

A Bourail community association turns volunteer beach patrols into round-the-clock protection for the South Pacific's second-largest loggerhead turtle nesting site.

🇦🇺 Australia · CERES (Centre for Education and Research in Environmental Strategies)

A former quarry and rubbish tip beside Melbourne's Merri Creek is now an 11-acre free public urban farm, nursery and environmental education hub.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Captain Fanplastic

A pirate story that ends with children treating the litter on their own beach as treasure rather than rubbish.

🇧🇩 Bangladesh · Bangladesh Waste Pickers Union (BWPU)

Dumpsite pickers around Dhaka's Matuail landfill, led by women, have formed a union demanding to be legally recognised as environmental workers.

🇻🇪 Venezuela · Fundación Musical Simón Bolívar (El Sistema)

A free, government-funded network of children's orchestras and choirs has spent fifty years turning Venezuela's poorest barrios into concert halls.

🇧🇪 Belgium · Filter Café Filtré Atelier

Instead of going for their usual Friday coffee, a group of Brussels parents closed the road outside their children's school — and then kept doing it.

🌍 Global · Pure Earth

A backyard where car batteries are melted down looks like nothing at all — which is why roughly a billion children carry lead in their blood and almost nobody is looking for the source.

🇱🇻 Latvia · Latvijas Samariešu apvienība (Samaritan Association of Latvia)

A Riga-based food bank turns unsold groceries from Latvian retailers into parcels for families, pensioners and disabled people who don't qualify for state aid.

🇿🇦 South Africa · FoodForward SA

South Africa's largest food redistribution network rescues surplus food from farms and retailers and turns it into millions of meals for people going hungry.

🇲🇰 North Macedonia · Eko-svest (Center for Research and Information on Environment)

Eko-svest tore out an unneeded 50-metre concrete barrier from the Pčinja River, reopening 72 kilometres of free-flowing habitat for North Macedonia's freshwater fish.

🇶🇦 Qatar · Friends of the Environment Center

Qatar's oldest environmental NGO has spent three decades cataloguing the country's birds and wildlife while teaching a generation of schoolchildren to protect them.

🇹🇻 Tuvalu · Fusi Alofa Association Tuvalu

Tuvalu's only organisation run by and for people with disabilities is building the nation's first inclusive classrooms, one atoll at a time.

🇮🇳 India · Care for Air

A volunteer-driven Delhi non-profit that turned parental worry over toxic winters into a Supreme Court petition and a citywide clean-air education movement.

🇿🇼 Zimbabwe · Painted Dog Conservation

Anti-poaching rangers, a rehabilitation centre and a bush camp for local kids are keeping Zimbabwe's endangered painted dogs alive.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Hortas Cariocas (Prefeitura do Rio de Janeiro)

Rio de Janeiro's city government pays residents to grow food on vacant lots and school grounds, turning idle urban land into tons of fresh produce for vulnerable communities.

🇭🇺 Hungary · Igazgyöngy Foundation (Igazgyöngy Alapítvány)

A visual-arts school in one of Hungary's poorest regions that turns disadvantaged, mostly Roma, children into award-winning artists while its social workers fight the poverty behind them.

🇨🇩 DR Congo · WASARU (Water and Sanitation in Rural and Urban Areas)

In a megacity of more than 17 million people with almost no public air data, a Congolese sanitation NGO is installing the country's only open real-time PM2.5 network and taking the readings into classrooms.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Red Rocket South Africa (Pty) Ltd

Two run-of-river turbines on the Ash River generate enough renewable power for nearly 2,000 Free State households, with a share of revenue funding local jobs, a gym and a children's daycare.

🇲🇽 Mexico · Liga Peatonal

Mexican pedestrian collectives wrote themselves a charter of rights, then held a national congress every year to make cities honour it.

🇮🇸 Iceland · SEA LIFE Trust Beluga Whale Sanctuary (Puffling Patrol partner)

Fledgling puffins get lured off course by the lights of Heimaey town, so residents and volunteers collect them at night and release them at sea.

🇿🇦 South Africa · MusicWorks

Registered music therapists turn marimba bands, choirs and drumming circles into psychosocial support for children traumatised by violence and neglect on Cape Town's Cape Flats.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom · National Energy Action

In one of the richest countries in the world, millions of people ration their heating — and this charity has spent forty years arguing that is a policy choice.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Ndlovu Care Group

A Dutch doctor's rural clinic in Limpopo grew into a healthcare, education, and community-development group whose youth choir went on to captivate audiences on America's Got Talent.

🇫🇷 France · Association Respire

French clean-air association Respire helped push Paris to 279 car-free or calmed streets outside schools, and in 2026 celebrated forcing Suez to drop an incinerator project at Istres.

🇨🇷 Costa Rica · Monteverde Conservation League (Asociación Conservacionista de Monteverde)

A Costa Rican NGO built from schoolchildren's fundraising protects the country's largest private cloud forest reserve.

🇨🇰 Cook Islands · Punanga Turuturu Itivaine (PTI)

The Cook Islands' only dedicated women's counselling centre has spent three decades showing up when families are in crisis.

🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan · Red Crescent Society of Kyrgyzstan

On 15 July 2025 the Kyrgyz Red Crescent acted on a temperature forecast days ahead of a heatwave, delivering hygiene kits, food parcels and kits for children's stress to 15,000 people in the south before the peak hit.

🇹🇯 Tajikistan · Red Crescent Society of Tajikistan

In Tajikistan's mountains, the Red Crescent has already stored window insulation, floor insulation and electric heaters for 1,233 households, ready to ship the day a deadly cold wave is forecast.

🇩🇲 Dominica · Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI)

Two Dominican primary schools flattened by Hurricane Maria now run on solar-and-battery microgrids that double as hurricane shelters.

🌍 Global · We Care Solar

A Berkeley nonprofit equips last-mile health clinics with rugged 'Solar Suitcase' kits, giving midwives reliable light and power to safely deliver babies after dark.

🇲🇼 Malawi · SolarAid

Rather than lighting scattered households, SolarAid tried lighting one entire Malawian village at once — and reached 99% of it.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom · Mums for Lungs

A group of South London mothers pushing prams through Brixton smog now has primary-school children painting clean-air banners that hang on Lambeth and Southwark lampposts.

🇦🇹 Austria · Superar

Started by the Vienna Concert Hall, the Vienna Boys' Choir and Caritas Vienna in 2009, Superar gives children who couldn't otherwise afford it free, intensive orchestra and choir training.

🇳🇿 New Zealand · Te Kōhanga Reo National Trust

Since 1982, whānau-run Kōhanga Reo language nests have immersed tens of thousands of Māori children in te reo Māori from birth, reviving a language once on the brink of loss.

🇵🇫 French Polynesia · Te Mana O Te Moana

A Moorea-based clinic has nursed hundreds of injured sea turtles back to health and taught tens of thousands of Polynesian schoolchildren to protect the ocean.

🇵🇭 Philippines · Manila Water Foundation

Manila Water Foundation says it has led the installation of over 300 multi-faucet hand-hygiene stations in Philippine schools and public institutions, many with ten taps so a whole class can wash at once.

🇵🇪 Peru · Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense

For decades the smelter at La Oroya put so much lead, arsenic and sulphur dioxide into the air that children's blood tested above safe limits almost universally — and in 2024 an international court finally said the state was responsible.

🇿🇦 South Africa · The Chaeli Campaign

Founded by a nine-year-old wheelchair user who asked her community to fund one, the Chaeli Campaign now runs inclusive early-childhood, arts, and advocacy programmes for thousands of South African children with disabilities.

🇵🇸 Palestine · The Freedom Theatre

A theatre school inside Jenin refugee camp has given Palestinian children a stage and a camera as tools of nonviolent resistance since 2006.

🇮🇹 Italy · Genitori Tarantini

In the Tamburi district of Taranto, families were told to keep children indoors on windy days, because the wind carries iron dust off the slag heaps of the steelworks next door.

🇧🇫 Burkina Faso · Kéré Foundation

A classroom in Burkina Faso that stays cool without a fan, because the roof floats above the ceiling and lets the hot air climb out.

🇿🇲 Zambia · Environment Africa

The mine at Kabwe closed in 1994 and was never cleaned up, so children play on tailings and more than nine in ten of them have lead in their blood.

🇳🇱 Netherlands · IVN Natuureducatie

IVN plants tennis-court-sized Tiny Forests on Dutch schoolyards and street corners, turning paved city plots into dense, biodiverse outdoor classrooms.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom · Trees for Cities

Trees for Cities plants and cares for urban trees, edible schoolyards and green infrastructure across UK cities to close the tree-equity gap.

🇹🇷 Türkiye · Temiz Hava Hakki Platformu

A coalition of health and nature groups won a Council of State ruling in September 2026 halting a rule that could have exempted coal plants, steel mills and cement works from pollution standards.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Ubuntu Pathways

One integrated campus in Zwide township delivers healthcare, schooling, and family support to 2,000 vulnerable children so poverty stops with their generation.

🇺🇾 Uruguay · Plan Ceibal

Plan Ceibal, the agency that put a computer in the hands of every Uruguayan schoolchild, handles just 1% of the country's imported electronics yet accounts for 14% of the e-waste Uruguay actually processes.

🇮🇳 India · Warrior Moms

Five worried Delhi mothers turned lockdown blue skies into a pan-India movement demanding clean air for every child.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Zip Zap Circus

A free, uniquely South African circus school trains Cape Town youth of every background in trapeze, acrobatics and performance, turning street kids into professional artists.